The tiny hip coffee shop where they know your name
Sit by waist-height shell-pink windows for the open half of the day
Until at once, you’re outside and you’ve never been in
And you’re living vicariously through pretty women
Flick your eyes, pocket hands, feel the wind blow through you
Unwelcome airs glare to pass bricks under shoes
The word isn’t envy, more mixed and unclear
Knowing this ain’t you and wondering why you’re here
Pressed against unknown humans kneaded into their dough
Inadequate in context stretched vast and shallow
Recognise no features, all mushed into one face
It’s grandiose gaze bore on me is both of our waste
Banquet Hall
Today I woke up somewhere new. It was the first time in a decade… And then my brain whispered me a correction. No buddy, you’ve been so wrapped up in yourself (and not that side of yourself, the other, laser-focused side) that you’re getting me seasick. If it’s been a decade on the futon, then look closely at the lack of nibbling button-dents in your cocooned caterpillar of a spine? And also, why do you get a sick feeling of timeline’s splitting in your peripheral perception like pulled apart grilled-cheese? Because, newsflash butterbean, it’s been two weeks. That feeling in your stomach isn’t slapping with you, it’s lurching against your impulse on its own organic memory. It was only two sprinkled pinches of sleepy eye crust since you slept back and forth so fast each night between pre and post horizon housing that you felt like you were running a bleep test along to your morning alarms. Bed, bed, futon, bed, futon, futon, parent’s spare room, friends couch, futon, bed, bed, futon, we’re moving out so the bed isn’t here any more so I guess floor, futon, futon, futon, floor, futon, floor, floor, friend’s floor, futon, etc. How did you so completely wash that feeling out of your saturated brain? And now you’ve remembered this, buddy, there’s a whole trashed banquet hall that you said you’d clean, only to vanish after just sweeping the floor. The red wine has only soaked deeper into the carpets, and you’ve only noticed it now after you started, but those champagne flutes you caved in as furious projectiles against the wall have turned into a fine sharp mist of broken glass frosting over everything. Pleased to have you back.
Empty House Era
An empty house is very calming, but in a way that you can look into and appreciate, but not participate in, because its lack of life to participate in is precisely the source of its still serenity. And it only gets cleaner, and gleams more perfect the harder you work to get it back as you found it. Able to touch, but not breath in the rare atmosphere your very inability is filling the empty, sun painted rooms with, bigger and more abundant now than ever they were when you could truly be in them. Your life here has become silent, and the quiet space exhales. It could never be like this for you. It only reveals its beauty as you look back. You didn’t clean it like this, you didn’t clear it like this. Would you have ever seen it like this if you had? Would you have needed to leave, and set it free?
Then hits the moment you realise there’s nothing else left to do.
I am finally here in the emptiness. Nothing left to scrub. Nothing left to pack. And it’s time to go as the sun leaves first. I’m trying to absorb it, the feeling of being here in an important double-year moment of a fleeting life. But this moment isn’t that. I can’t see my life here anymore. The place is the same, but dismantling this setting has taken so much time and pure essence that it feels as though the phase it represents hasn’t even lasted until this bittersweet end. Dismantling it has become its own phase. I haven’t been, for a while, in the place I’m only just leaving. And so how do you leave? How long is it ok to stare into it longing for a reflection? Door ajar, peering in after pacing through over and over. I am dry immersed, I’m here where the memories live but they can’t absorb me into them anymore. I am a ghost of myself that lived here, stalking the hallways long after my life here ended. And yet here I still am and here I still live. And that’s torn me apart, and it’s been fine. But this is the last night I will be here as myself, in a place that I happened. How can I say goodbye over this distance? All that looks back is finality, and I realise I don’t know what I’m looking for here. Old sights and sounds, but the lighting has all changed. This isn’t my place, but I’m still here looking for visions in empty rooms. I wanted to leave but by now it hurts to go. I am alone here for the last time. It is cleaned and sanitised of my existence. It has let me go, but as I cross the precipice and look back inside, unable to close the door or break my gaze from drinking it’s final sight of somewhere so familiar and dear, in ways I didn’t know it was until my last moments with it, it still wants something. I can’t look away. It has let me go, but there is something stopping it from releasing me. It has let me go, but I am still holding onto a part of it. A part that I give back to it the second I break my gaze and shut the door on the last sights of the backdrop to an era. Saying goodbye to a silent old friend. It needs that part of it I’m keeping, the part I’m trying to drink in as much of as I can right now, and for entire weeks before, the part that I surrender as soon as I go. And it hurts to give it that. But after all it’s done for me, I owe it to this old place.
And now this…
And now this… An alarm I can’t ignore I smother but remain alarmed It breaks back to before in a another foaming wave The break in our break away from breaking Washing back across shifting rocks to turbulent home I had started my own sea
Frozen Ricochet
It’s always felt sad to lose The stuff that touched your life The headlights silent scan your room In the middle of the night Shadows swell and carousel Sweeping the dormant air The stillness bends but doesn’t break The furniture doesn’t care This is every place you’ve ever held Keys to lock up for the night And never once imagined how It rests outside your sight And driven home defeated Followed hands and not your head Making slow turns lost in thought Empty streets pulled past by reflex With a lifetime’s worth of practice You’ve grown too tired to sleep Eyelid scissors have scraped too blunt To cut off from the conscious stream Didn’t even realise they weren’t closed Until the frozen ricochet Of soft lamps passing unaware Showed you your home in a new way And literally lit up your life As laid across this space That you rent and that you cherish And you wake in and you hate As a stranger you will never know For a washing degree Gifts you a feeling rare and precious Warm and sad and temporary
The Living Room Has Changed
The living room has changed. It’s nice, I admit, though I’m not great with change. I find some pain in it. I find some pain in what is lost to it. The rooms of this house are always in motion. One guest room still holds the air from my old bedroom, with flecks of the old purple paint still visible from strange angles only I would ever see.
I came back after a difficult first few months in my new flat, an odd number of years old. A brief stay home from an unfriendly city, with an unlucky crew of strangers, in a wipe-down boarding hall. I sat in an armchair in this warm living room and had conversations with people that knew me well. I ate their food and slept in the bed my parents bought me urgently from the charity shop after I came home from the hospital with a broken leg. This bed that I’d hated as a snapped teenager was now so nourishing. Just as breaking my leg was awful as it healed, but would go on to teach me a lot, I knew leaving home was necessary. But I hadn’t realised how much I had missed this dose of comfort. If I hadn’t jumped off of that roof I may have never stopped sleeping on a mattress on the floor. If I’d never moved out of my parent’s house I may have never learnt to accept the pain of life-changing and its components becoming lost.
There was a dog and a cat I knew. We had seen each other after school, on evenings and weekends, as I laid on the living room carpet in the middle of the week, filling out applications and order forms for my dismal catalogue sales job. My darker days of deep unemployment, where they would silently watch me, puzzled as I scrambled to get dressed just before my parents returned home from work. The dog was big and black with glassy eyes to his gentle soul, calm and observant. As I stroked him he tilted his head up at me and I was reminded of how he would stare up at us when we spoke to him, turning his head to one side when we did something he didn’t understand. I wondered if he understood why on one normal day I left the house and just didn’t come home again. I wondered if he knew why I was now back. He was getting older now, his energy growing softer, no longer in his bouncing youth. When I was younger my dad would occasionally try to wrestle me on this blue carpet, and our dog would not be able to contain himself. He would be straight at the edge of the ring, licking us to try and tag himself in. I have not seen this kind of openly vulnerable friendliness while I have been away, everything has been much more complicated than this. The cat was small and uninterested, as always. After she sleeps she wants to play, and when she decides we’re done she wants to groom herself before purring into a croissant shape on top of someone. She is still young and leaps around casually, shuffling her legs as she sleeps under a stool, in chasing dreams of long grass and hiding places. Her dynamic with the dog is one of parallel running tolerance and acceptance. There is no real bond, but no conflict either, only some intrigue.
The dog arrived here when he was four, raised by and alongside cats in a household that couldn’t give him what he needed as he grew into himself. He was the most polite dog I had ever met, and over the years of knowing him, he healed my deep distrust of dogs, leftover in me from accompanying my dad as a young child while we walked our previous dog through our intimidating neighbourhood parks. When we brought home our cat she was still a very young kitten, adopted by us from a kitchen floor crawling with multiple litters of fuzzy little futures. She had barely been handled and was very shy at first, spending a good amount of her life getting adjusted to being comfortable with people, often being known to bolt at any disturbance. Growing up, she learnt the ropes from careful and distant observation of the dog, whose cool attitude would rub off on her gradually. So we had a cat who acted kind of like a dog who acted kind of like a cat. I missed them both when I headed back after the Christmas break, to a place that didn’t uphold a trace of their non-judgemental ease and acceptance. The pain helps you grow, but it still hurts.
The halls I lived away in were a kind of home to me, in a warped way and an austere sense. I felt this only as my things sat piled and packed to depart, in the corner of the bare room as the sun cast shapes in through the twin windows. Although it meant that I would get to return to my parent’s house for the summer, I felt the hit of loss at the idea of leaving this room behind. This was my only safe sanctuary in the pioneering days of a new phase of life. This was the first place in my life that I lived away from where I was raised, out on my own. As my parents waited in the car downstairs for me, their second and only visit here since dropping me off on my first day, I felt deeply sad at the idea of locking up this room that I’d had such a hard time in. I turned and hugged the wall with tears in my eyes at the thought of never seeing this place again. I desperately hung in the silent air, taking in as much as I could of this place that only suddenly felt so sacred to me in the last hours before it was time for me to close it off. I took too long in there, unable to pull myself away, not knowing how to break the gaze of a final look at something that felt so important. I abandoned that room only when the pain forced me to. I tried to gather myself in the hallway, through the staircase and the courtyard, but each hurt me more as I saw them for the last time. As I climbed into the back of the car, my parents asked me what I’d been doing up there. I tried to hide my wet eyes and told them I’d just been saying goodbye to my old room. I did the same thing as I departed the low house against the park a year later. I’ve done it everywhere I’ve lived since.
Singing Songs In Flat 7
I am relieved that I could finally pull together a song about moving on from the old apartment. It’s not always easy to find things to write about, especially when you live a pretty solitary lifestyle. You usually have to look a little deeper at the things that really mean something to you. If a lot of those things seem kind of mundane, you have to stare into them until you penetrate through to some meaning. It really doesn’t feel like it matters anymore. As long as you are close enough to something, you might be able to show an insight. Anything can be wonderful if it can be truly personal and real. And told in the right way.
Moving house is one of those things that is both a big change and also a pretty widely experienced event. Yet, there aren’t too many songs about it. There’s maybe ‘Sun In An Empty Room’ and then…
I spent a long time thinking about picking up and heading out in the months and weeks leading up to our moving. All the wide facts snaking through my brain in thick cables, orbited by every subtle implication, spinning off, discovered, and waiting to be. Very difficult to maneuver through with any grace, and so easy to slip through cracks and get lost in. This is how I mostly experience and process of change. I am unable to dodge or run from the infinite reflection. It’s only healthy to think stuff through and look back for a while. To avoid that responsibility to yourself is dangerous in its own way. My problem is that my mind over-indulges in reflection, going far past the point of usefulness, and sometimes so unnecessarily deep that the light starts to thin and the scale of things can warp out of proportion. I was so deeply worried, I didn’t want to forget anything about the place that had been the one consistent backdrop for the last couple of years of my life. It’s not the place, so much as the years of your life that feel so truly precious, and that’s what I get sentimental over. Not that I can’t live here anymore, but that those years of my life are drifting away and across a break in setting, over a threshold where just the place can no longer be looked at on its own to extract memories from.
Maybe this is what familiarity is, a continuity that ties you together.
The place meant a lot to me through the lens of everyday life, the mundane and un-noteworthy ninety percent of seeing, feeling, breathing, and living. No less than the exciting remainder, blasé only in that there is just so much of this beautiful side of life that we sometimes forget how to enjoy it. A sheer plane that you need to glimpse the edge of sometimes to even know it’s there. When you approach the edges of the everyday, that is when you make out the definition. Moving house is one of these such edges, a miniature death of a version of you that in its last motions sees its entire life flash before its eyes, mourning itself before it is even gone.
Quit Vision 